announcing the availability of packages for the Arm architecture

[Tim Kientzle]

On Nov 4, 2012, at 6:36 PM, Dave Hayes wrote:

> On 10/30/12 07:18, Ian Lepore wrote:
>> All in all, I have the impression that not many people "use" freebsd on
>> arm at all.
> 
> Just getting to the point of "using" it is quite time intensive. I ran out of time trying to get my dreamplug to where I want it. These issues were in my way (this was some time ago, check the list for dates):
> 
> - install requires non-trivial patches and kernel config

There are a few people working on build systems to
simplify this.  My scripts work pretty much "out-of-the-box"
for RaspberryPi and BeagleBone now and should be easily
extensible to other platforms.

> - building ports on the device itself is dog slow (I likely need to put a swap partition on a usb stick to do that since the machine has no swap in the first place)

FreeBSD ports team is now building packages for ARM.

> - no qemu support to use faster machines to emulate arm to build ports
> - cross compiling ports is too dangerous

A lot of people are looking at cross-compiling.  I think
we'll see some progress there in the next few months.

> ... most developers here seem to be on -current (I believe this is version 10),…

The inexpensive new boards coming out are only supported
on -CURRENT right now.

> Maybe the Raspberry PI estrus will change that? 

I think it could.

One big barrier to FreeBSD on arm has simply been that
each new board only attracts a few developers.  And each
new board requires new drivers, new boot sequencing,
etc, etc.  It's an immense fragmentation problem.

I've been trying to talk up FreeBSD-on-RaspberryPi since
I think that could attract enough of a user base to really
become a mature platform. 

Even if you prefer a "more beefy" system like the DreamPlug
or PandaBoard or … , consider getting a RaspberryPi as well
and tinkering with that for a little bit.  It's only $35.

Tim